Summary

Wandering in Darkness is an intricate
philosophical defense for the problem of suffering as it is presented by
medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas.The work addresses the philosophical / theological
problem of evil, which might be expressed as follows: if one posits an all-good, all-powerful God
as creator, yet suffering exists in the world, then (a) God must be evil, since
he created it; (b) God is less than all-powerful, since suffering came to be in
his creation, and he could not stop it; (c) God is evil and weak, since
suffering came to be in his creation, and he did not want to stop it; or (d)
suffering is an illusion. No alternative
is, of course, very satisfying. In her book, Eleanore Stump augments Thomas
Aquinas’s theodicy by reflecting upon what she calls “the desires of the
heart,” a dimension of human experience that Aquinas leaves largely untreated
in his consideration. Stump explores
this dimension by breathtaking exegeses of Biblical narratives as narratives: the stories of Job,
Samson, Abraham, and Mary of Bethany.
“Understood in the contexts of [these] narratives,” Stump argues,
“Aquinas’s theodicy explains in a consistent and cogent way why God would allow
suffering" (22).

Commentary

This is a daunting but impressively rich examination of the problem of
suffering and the ways that narrative engagement is the best and perhaps the
only truly effective way of examining the issue. Against the prevalent tides in biblical
studies to use Scripture as historical source material for the understanding of
ancient civilization, Stump argues that “it is legitimate to examine biblical
narratives philosophically" (xix). In thinking with stories, she undertakes a specific
philosophical enterprise: to offer a story that might be true (there is insufficient reason to discount it) and
that, therefore, “for all we know, there might also be a morally sufficient
reason in the actual world for an omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly good God to
allow suffering" (19). Readers of literature will generally be less interested in the philosophical
argument, per se, than the way that
Stump uses narrative engagement to contemplate the issue. And in participating in the
process, one can hardly fail to be deeply struck at what a cultural
gift the biblical stories are, to the extent that they help listeners share in
an untold comfort, communally experienced.

Stump’s readings of the stories of Job,
Samson, Abraham, and Mary of Bethany are fresh, intelligent, and insightful,
though the richness of them can truly be grasped only through sharing in the
progression of the overall argument. Her discussion of the nested structure
of The Book of Job is particularly striking, specifically in her reference to fractals. “A graphed fractal,”
she says, is “a picture within a picture within a picture, and so on, each
picture of which is similar to the picture of the whole, only reduced in scale" (220). Pointing to the mathematical Mandelbrot set—where
“any detail of the fractal is enlarged, its graph closely resembles the graph
of the whole but is not identical to it”—Stump demonstrates that “the details
of God’s dealings with Job and also their outcome is very similar but not
identical to the details and outcome of God’s dealings with Satan or with
non-human animals and the other parts of creation;” and thus, the book of Job
appears to be “the second-person [God’s relational engagement] analogue of a
Mandelbrot set" (220-21). The stories of Job and
of Satan “can be extended indefinitely in [fractal fashion],” but “they
obviously cannot be told in an indefinitely extended way in one narrative. And so the book of Job gives us Job’s
story. But by explicitly giving us that
story as an enlarged detail of a much larger story, it helps us understand the
fractal nature of God’s care for all creation and the many stories we are not being given" (221). The much larger story, Stump tells us in her
exquisite Prologue, is “that suffering can be redeemed for the sufferer in
personal relationship, that heartbreak can be woven into joy through the
reciprocity of love" (xix).

Miscellaneous

Considerable portions of this book were delivered as part of the 2005
Gifford Lectures, the 2006 Wilde Lectures at Oxford, and the 2009 Stewart
Lectures at Princeton.